Teachable Moments: Critic Mumford sees good, bad of city life

Critic hoped he was wrong about how technology would cripple civilization

4:17 AM,
Oct. 19, 2013

Critic Lewis Mumford

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It seems that while technology advances, the manner in which we use it changes little.

In 1934, the social and architecture critic Lewis Mumford wrote in his book "Technics and Civilization":

"On one side is the gigantic printing press, a miracle of fine articulation, which turns out the tabloid newspaper: on the other side are the contents of the tabloid itself, symbolically recording the most crude and elementary states of emotion." ...